What's interesting is that I recently watched The Red Pill Documentary. I recall when it was released that the director, Cassie Jaye a self professed feminist was pilloried absolutely everywhere for giving a voice to Mens Rights Activists. The actual documentary is quite milquetoast.
What it is, is her engaging with the ideas around how in some ways men are disadvantaged in modern society. It's fascinating to me that the fundamental issue in the red pill is, whenever someone tries to point out where society is failing boys and men no-one listens and they get shouted down.
As pointed out by Corrine Barraclough, of the Australian tabloid newspaper The Daily Telegraph, who said in her review of the film that "the message of The Red Pill is compassion" and the film made her "wonder why feminists tried so hard to silence this crucial conversation."
I feel the same about "The Red Pill" movie and couldn't see how the criticism aligned with the reality. What I do see often is that entrenched actors and groups will attack, with specially reserved ardor, any artist or production taking a position of understanding and shared interest between groups or actors that are meant to be at odds.
With this movie, the critics could have said the filmmaker, Alex Lee Moyer, avoided the most misogynistic fringe that could be associated with the Men's Rights movement and been correct but that would undermine the safe thing to say, that the _entire_ Men's Rights movement is fringe and misogynistic.
I'm not especially interested in Men's Rights but I thought the movie was a refreshing surprise, commend the risk taken by the creator, and hope people continue to take risks when the evidence leads them into the unexpected.
PS: The film maker went on to make "TFW No GF" which followed and explored lonely, young men. Searching "Alex Lee Moyer", the second result is a Rolling Stone article on this movie with the headline, "‘TFW No GF’ Is a Deeply Uncomfortable Portrayal of Incel Culture". Here are just a couple quotes that show how much bull this director has had thrown her way for her troubles:
> This non-judgmental approach has made many viewers deeply uncomfortable, with writer Eric Langberg tweeting that the film is “one of the most irresponsible docs I’ve ever seen,” leading to a barrage of abuse from incels on Twitter.
> But even if you believe that objectivity is the best approach to capturing a subculture marked by misogyny, violence, and racism, it’s hard to accept the argument that the film’s relationship with its subjects is wholly objective in the first place.
Clearly, how dare she go and explore this sub-culture by meeting and filming some of its members, willing or not, without reminding the audience that these are bad people that say bad things on the internet and laugh at bad jokes.
> couldn't see how the criticism aligned with the reality.
I think it’s the same phenomenon of people skipping the article and going straight to the comments where they make statements based on the headline and their own existing contexts.
By the time they learn the content, if they ever do, they dig in and try to defend their positions.
I think this is caused by the incentive is for karma/whuffie/whatever rather than actual knowledge and benefit to fellow man. So macro is that the first to comment gets the most points. And everything else is downstream results.
So people assume the doc is about bad people doing bad things and talk like that. It doesn’t help that it also falls into the complex zone of “Hitler loved dogs” where people who truly are jerks also are into redpill stuff, but likely a very small percent of the total number. So it’s easy to make reductive comments of “this jerk is into redpill let’s talk about him and get more clicks and ignore the thousands of men blowing their brains out [0]”
Frankly, I'm beginning to succumb to the belief that even knowing the truth, or attempting to find it, is a lose-lose activity. First, I have to dig for it and evaluate the probabilities, credentials, incentives, and context until I'm confident. Second, I have to obscure my informed opinion.
While they're ignored up to the point they do blow their brains out, they're then a welcome addition to the number of gun deaths, which is often used interchangeably when referring to statistics describing gun violence.
It wasn't that many years ago people did word bubble (frequencies) of reddit subreddits, and both Feminist and Mens Rights Activists subs was very similar. The most common word in the Feminist one was "Men", and the most common word for Mens Rights Activists was Women". The second most common word was also symmetric, Women in the first and Men in the other.
It is not symmetric to assume that all female equality issues and all male equality issues must be the fault of men. People are human. Faults in human society is from humans, and humans are 50% women and 50% men.
Sorry, any mention of "biological essentialism" is explicitly banned there. Unfortunately, a lot of biology is indeed objective essentialist. It's a terrible subreddit made for people who think that the solution to every problem that men face is to simply go read "Come as You Are" or some other shit from Bell Hooks.
So biology says tomato is a fruit. In the kitchen we consider it a vegetable.
Could the same be true for the whole gender discussion? That biology gets side-stepped in the name of common sense (that does not answer questions regarding toilets, sports competitions and mis-pronouning; but it would give us some space without totally invalidating biology)
Do we base sports on the biological reality of sex or mute our awareness of that objective fact[1] to preference “identity” — even if the outcome is females[2] no longer having a space to compete?
[1] - Humans like other apes (and mammals) are sexually dimorphic.
[2] - Female is the scientific term referring to the sex.
I think in sports we should "call a tomato a fruit" where at work/school/sociallife we should call a tomato a vegetable is the tomato wishes to be called a vegetable. :)
It does not make sense in sports. Otherwise the women's leagues would become trans-leagues.
which is stupid, because at least with professional sports it deals with 0,001% of population. And in some rando backyard leagues no one cares. Really bad hill to die on.
The issue is that if you get rid of the male/female bracket - you’re going to never see women win almost any sports at all. As soon as men go through puberty - most women are at a significant biological disadvantage. Turns out, some women like sports and like to compete. They don’t want to compete against men because it’s very lopsided and unfair due to biology.
I don't suggest that. I suggest denying trans women opportunity to (professionally) compete. I believe this is inherently discriminatory, but better than all other alternatives.
I also believe this is 99% smaller problem than anyone talking about it believes.
They can still compete with the other men. The only difference is that they won't get the affirmation they crave from competing against actual female women. But that's their own personal problem to deal with in their own minds.
Correct. I am not and have not been involved with any of those communities. I saw the documentary was free on YouTube and was interested in watching it because I recalled the controversy over it.
If it fosters civil discussion because everything is discussed through the same lens that you agree with, which is the exact same view point as 4000 other feminist subreddits, then I'm not sure how it would add anything.
It's a honeypot. It prioritizes feminism / viewing issues under the lens of feminism, over solving the issues boys/men have. In bad cases, the advice given is downright self-destructive, as the political/social climate is not there for individual men to act the way that sub would recommend.
> I just know it's gonna be the patriarchy/masculinity, right?
I don't think a single person blames masculinity for mens problems. Did you by any chance hear the word toxic masculinity and assume all masuclinity was under attack because that is not the same?
Also, ngl your comment reads like "ohh why am I bleeding, without checking with a doctor I am gonna guess the answer is the knife lodged in my back, right?" Like the sarcastic tone is there but the answer is still right. Post-sarcasm is a 10 year old concept but damn your comment is almost museum worthy.
Name a positive masculine trait, something which men tend to have and women tend not to (should go without saying - it's not a "masculine" trait otherwise).
> Name a positive masculine trait, something which men tend to have and women tend not to
This question is wrong. I mean, in the sense that a valid english sentence does not mean a valid question. See for example "which colour is the number 4" or "how many notes does the capital of france have". They are syntactically valid questions but have no real meaning.
There are no masculine traits that men have and women dont, that is not what masculinity even means. What traits, behaviours and modes of expression are related to masculinity (in western culture) are things such as leadership, honor, aggresion, competitiveness. There is a long history as to why this is the case, some cultural, some historical some arguable biological essentialist. But just because testosterone makes you more aggresive, and more competitive does not mean women are not, or can not be, competitive or ambitious.
In the same veing that feminine traits like emotional regulation, teammwork, compassion etc are not something men do not have. It is not like men only do individual sports and women only do team sports.
in other words, pitting them as exclussionary is framing the entire conversation wrong, and therefore even haviing this as an assumption "should go without saying - it's not a "masculine" trait otherwise" makes the entire question wrong.
From false you can prove anything, is an old adage in formal logic F -> any(P) . but you cannot, and should not form a basis of "masculine traits are those not expressed by women", but "masculine traits are the cultural aspects related to masculinity in a specific culture". Now you can define masculinity and time period and culture and get an answer. But the definition of "not expressed by women" is just wrong from the offset.
> But just because testosterone makes you more aggresive, and more competitive does not mean women are not, or can not be, competitive or ambitious.
People always jump to biology when there isn't much to support a cultural observation. Often than not conclusions based on hormones tend to be false.
Testosterone makes people aggresive as estrogen make people hysterical. The trouble with this model is that when tested (within levels that occur in nature), Testosterone does not make people aggressive nor does estrogen make people hysterical. Hormones are about sexual reproduction and neither aggression or hysteria provide benefits in that domain.
What Testosterone (using more modern research) does (among other things) is to increase behavior towards maintaining social status based on whatever social behavior has in the individual person culture been imprinted. To use other words, Testosterone trigger learned behaviors in specific circumstances in order to maximize chances of sexual reproduction in specific cultural environments.
Estrogen too is significant more complex and research on this subject is even more spotty. There are multiple forms of Estrogen, and the effect is generally about its proportional relation to other hormones.
The conversation is very technical and I just wanted to point towards a "simple" example that most people can relate to.
Yes the behavioural effect of hormones goes beyond simple "aggresion up" nonsense, however it is reported that feelings of loneliness, aggresion and hornyness are reported in many transmen when starting the test treatments. Between this observation and the memories of male puberty many cis men have I think using aggresion as a proxy to describe some of perhaps bio causes of our societal understanding of masculinity is not a terrible example.
I used pink/blue as an example of non bio masculine and feminine traits that point towards the core issue of masculinity being entirely a social construct and the bio argument being almost irrelevant when discussing the whole thing. I just thought it was a simple example, but I do concede that hormone effects on the body are multiple, complicated and in many ways misunderstood so perhaps it was not a great choice.
> There are no masculine traits that men have and women dont
This is not true. There are obvious traits as humans aren’t unique in biology. It’s not to say that these things are unique to women or men, but that they are more common.
Male swans are larger than female swans. This doesn’t mean that all male swans are larger than all female swans. But it’s a masculine trait.
There are obvious traits that are masculine and feminine and some are positive or negative. And some were more positive or negative historically and in the future.
This doesn’t mean that one sex is superior to another in general.
All humans have equal rights to dignity even though different sexes and genders have specific advantages and disadvantages.
But just showing the height differences of men and women is pretty clear. That was more useful 800 years ago when people wore armor and fought wars and less useful in the future when people work in space.
> Male swans are larger than female swans. This doesn’t mean that all male swans are larger than all female swans. But it’s a masculine trait.
So it depends on definition here right. The trait "taller" is masculine with respect to female swans. But Height, is not something that women do not have.
Dutch people are taller than the rest of the planet, that does not make Dutch women more masculine than American men. hence my point that something that is masculine cannot be defined as something women do not have.
> But Height, is not something that women do not have.
Height is not masculine. Higher height than women is masculine. The average man is taller than the average woman.
The average Dutch man is taller than the average Dutch woman.
Traits doesn’t mean only one sex has it. It just means a difference.
Both men and women have testosterone and estrogen. But the levels are the traits difference between them.
I’m not sure what you’re arguing as the request was to name something that men are better at than women, some characteristic. You should be able to do that as it’s simple.
It doesn’t seem that you’re arguing that there’s no difference. Just some weird semantic debate with yourself about what “trait” means.
> The average man is taller than the average woman.
Yes, but that was kinda my point. "Taller" is a comparative trait not an intrinsic one. If you are the last person on earth, things like your height, your test level, how you keep your beard etc remain. But you are not taller than anyone.
> Traits doesn’t mean only one sex has it
That is how the dude above me defined it, hence my complaint, thanks for agreeing with me here.
> But the levels are the traits difference between them.
Yes, but also those traits individually are not enough. Similar to Species in an animal group, what we look for are clusters. Clusters of traits that are masculine/feminine etc makes us read a human as feminine or masculine.
> It doesn’t seem that you’re arguing that there’s no difference.
My argument is that masculine and feminine are mostly made up social constructs that we mold based on many times silly stuff. Like people in croatia used to ride a horse with a necktie to not get swea on their shirts, and the king of france liked it so much he copied it but made it expensive with silk, then rich twats in france followed and 400 years later all men in banking wear ties, as peak masculine work uniform. There is nothing "masculine" about a french king copying a necktie and yet culturally it is enshrined.
So I was arguing that the position that masculine is something women tend not to do/or have is wrong. That is not how masculine or feminine things start, they start at random many times and culturally stick.
You've attempted to subtly rephrase the question - I said "tend" for a reason, thus I will sadly have to discard the rest of your post. In fact, it puzzles me why you bothered writing a wall of text here, surely you didn't believe this wouldn't be seen through instantly?
> You've attempted to subtly rephrase the question
I didn't. I just pointed out that definying masculinity as exclusionary from women is wrong by definition. Pointed out a number of traits that are currently considered masculine in modern western society and also pointed out how despite their definition we see tons of overlap on those formal categories.
The part I objected too was defining masculinty as "should go without saying - it's not a "masculine" trait otherwise".
To give a very obvious example. Blue is masculine and pink is feminine, this is inarguable however less than 100 years ago the opposite was true. It does goes with saying that masucline is not something men show and women tend not to. Because masculinity is not defined on biological essentialism, it is largely cultural.
By starting with a false assumption "It cannot be masculine if men do not showcase this trait more than women" you can come to wrong conclusions, because from false you can prove anything.
You did, you even replied for a moment removing the "tend" with an imaginary quote:
> You said tend sure, but still defined masculine as "something women do not have". See the lack of Tend there.
Tend was always there in my comment - twice.
But even excepting that, there are still flaws in your argument.
Firstly, my question was not related to biological essentialism. You can define "masculine" and "feminine" in a cultural context and still run into the same problem - which masculine traits, in the current cultural environment, are positive?
Secondly, we can trivially see from your examples that toxic and positive are flip-sides of the same thing. Traits you might define as positive, e.g. competitiveness and leadership require a degree of stoicism which would, in modern feminist terms, also be "toxic". Leaders of businesses can't be too concerned with putting their competitors out of a job, you can't lead an army (never mind fight in one) as a quivering wreck.
Let's call it a misunderstanding, and I apologise, I thought the part within parentheses was a bait and switch and I shouldn't have expected bad faith.
> you can define "masculine" and "feminine" in a cultural context and still run into the same problem - which masculine traits, in the current cultural environment, are positive?
That was already in my original comment, but traits like leadership, honor, strength, bravery, competence, intelligence, humour are all in some form or another in western culture male coded. Those are all insanely positive, and a real treat to not have to constantly be asserted.
> we can trivially see from your examples that toxic and positive are flip-sides of the same thing. Traits you might define as positive, e.g. competitiveness and leadership require a degree of stoicism which would, in modern feminist terms, also be "toxic".
So this is an important point. Yes, almost any trait CAN be positive or negative. Being competitive and wanting to win is good, training hard, pointing our flaws and working on them is good. Shouting at your coworkers, punching them and treating them like dogshit isn't, regardless if Michael Jordan thinks it is what made the chicago bulls win or not.
Also no modern feminist believes stoicism is inherently toxic. Stoicism is in many ways the basis of CBT which is considered by most modern psychologists as a cool tool to work on stuff and many modern feminists constantly talk about CBT. Youtube stoicism where a bald dude tells you to treat women and business as a goal, shut your feelings out and be an unfeeling terminator that only thinks of hustling and business is toxic, but calling that stoicism might make you rich because you can have infinite energy by using Marcus Aurelius spinning in his grave as a source of energy.
> Leaders of businesses can't be too concerned with putting their competitors out of a job
This is entirely based on the wrong assumption that the economy is a winner takes all market. Which it isn't. Yes you cannot think of your competition if you want to be an oil baron. But most software companies open source work, which benefits their competitiors because there are added benefits to strong ecosystems, healthy competition and interoperability of systems. See NATO having interoperable munition despite every country working in secret in the design of their own planes, tanks etc. If america (leaders in business in this example) sought to conquer the market, yes they would, but we would all have worse optics as France is a world leader.
/r/menslib is a honey pot by radical feminist super mods who delete absolutely everything that is even remotely not "xyz, but women still have it worse". It's probably one of the most censored subreddits, which is quite an achievement. Instead, take a look at /r/leftwingmaleadvocates for some actual discussion.
MensLib is overflowing with the kind of male feminist who will sling around "incel" as an insult for even the most milquetoast of takes.
And since the Red Pill documentary (bad name, middling content) was mentioned, I'll also point out that one of the feminists who featured in it was later outed as a sex pest, despite desperately trying to position himself as One of the Good Ones™:
> Surely, these questions of violence and sexuality are an arena where we need strong measures to make clear our intolerance for date and acquaintance rape, laws that protect women, social attitudes that believe women who do come forward.
I believe he's saying exactly what he wrote - that we should believe women who come forward. Note that he specifically mentions "social attitudes" separately from law/process.
And the women were believed. Their accusation was not dismissed, but taken seriously, an investigation started etc.
However, that is not the same thing as "accusation = guilt".
We live in the former world, not in the latter. Fortunately. And I am pretty sure he was describing the former, not the latter. And if he was describing the former, then he was simply wrong.
You seem to be using a different definition of "believe" to the rest of the English-speaking world [1]. Belief usually comes after investigation, it's certainly not a prerequisite.
If he meant that accusations should be taken seriously and investigated, those words were available to him. He chose "believe", and now I choose to believe his accusers.
As for the world we live in, you're thankfully correct (for the most part). Kimmel was an activist who wanted to change the world, and they do occasionally make progress in that direction [2][3].
"I'm nearing 30. I've internalized the "leave women alone at all times" and "men are trash" rhetoric so hard that I almost consider myself a burden to them simply by existing. I've gone out of my way to minimize interactions with women because I've catastrophized that my mere presence is bothersome."
I don't know if this was considered in the film (I haven't seen it), but the difference between how men's and women's issues are treated is quite obvious to me. It's due to an imbalance in the care matrix.
If we think broadly about who cares about whom, it goes like this:
* Men care about women because they want to mate with them,
* Women care about women because it's in their own best interest to look after each other (men only care about them for selfish reasons),
* Men don't care about men because it's not in their own best interest to do so, in fact it's advantageous to defeat other men,
* Women don't care about men because it's not in their own best interest to do so.
Essentially, women support each other, men compete with each other.
In every species female is the selector, that's how natural selection works.
Generally in a group of healthy young population with 50% sex ratio, about half of the men are selected, and they help eachother.
But in the online dating / birth control age this ratio has gone more extreme, and there's no real ,,parenting advice'' or emotional need support that can help, just accepting the new normal for everyone, and competing harder.
>In every species female is the selector, that's how natural selection works.
Maybe that is true if you are only talking about mammals. But it is certainly not true in general.
Here is an example directly from Wikipedia:
"In the size dimorphic wolf spider Tigrosa helluo, food-limited females cannibalize more frequently. Therefore, there is a high risk of low fitness for males due to pre-copulatory cannibalism, which led to male selection of larger females for two reasons: higher fecundity and lower rates of cannibalism."[0]
This means that in this species of spider is the male who applies the selective pressure.
You can look into sexual monomorphism/dimorphism to find more examples.
Men don't really compete due to a conscious desire to reproduce, though. It simply pleases men to have more power and more access to more women. The only reason is because they are descended from men who had power and access to women.
This seems to be a common misunderstanding of how natural selection works. Giraffes don't select other giraffes consciously because of their ability to reach higher leaves. They select them unconsciously simply because they are attracted to giraffes with longer necks. And they are attracted to giraffes with longer necks because they are descended from giraffes who were attracted to giraffes with longer necks and those giraffes were able to reach higher leaves and could slightly out-compete the other giraffes.
> TEDx are independent events similar to TED in presentation. They can be organized by anyone who obtains a free license from TED, and agrees to follow certain principles. TEDx events are required to be non-profit, but organizers may use an admission fee or commercial sponsorship to cover costs.
What it is, is her engaging with the ideas around how in some ways men are disadvantaged in modern society. It's fascinating to me that the fundamental issue in the red pill is, whenever someone tries to point out where society is failing boys and men no-one listens and they get shouted down.
As pointed out by Corrine Barraclough, of the Australian tabloid newspaper The Daily Telegraph, who said in her review of the film that "the message of The Red Pill is compassion" and the film made her "wonder why feminists tried so hard to silence this crucial conversation."